General spoilers for mid-season five, which is when this is set.

Disclaimer: Castiel is on my Christmas list. :D


He is… Human. Surprisingly, unnervingly, bewilderingly human.

He was born a man, but the world insisted he be more. It has bent and twisted him to his knees and to its will. It desired not a man, but a god. A being powerful enough to change the course of fate itself.

He knows it, and that is all the more bewildering. A man with the power of a god. But it doesn't feel like power. It feels like pain, like anger, like shock and horror and twisting, evil fingers. It feels like a death that lasts a lifetime.

And perhaps that has made the difference. Preserved him. Guarded. Saved.

Saved? Surely not.

I watch him when he is not looking. His road is dark and his body and mind cave slowly to that darkness. So easy to walk the dark path as a quiet shadow, unnoticed by the watching evil eyes. So much harder, so painful to shed the caliginous exterior and shine a light into the places that are dark, for there is so much shadow and so many watching eyes.

I watch them together. The other one is curious. He insults when he should comfort, he uses violence when kind words are needed, and he retreats within his own darkness when but a little light would guide them both to salvation.

I watch them, and I wonder. The insults do not shake and diminish him. He trades back his own, and grows a little stronger for it. He matches punch to punch and becomes calmer. And when the other retreats to the darkness, he comes a little more into the light to brighten the way for both.

It is… most curious. It is… human. Perhaps that is the most curious of all. He laughs, and it is real laughter at a real amusement, for humans find humor in even the darkest of places. Tears dampen his cheeks for real pain at the suffering of others. He feels compassion for them, human sorrow for human suffering. He squeezes the life out of every moment with an iron fist; laughter, tears, questions, answers, truths, lies, and a love of it all that borders on ecstasy. He is tempted, lost, loved, found, and that much emotion is a full life in every day. Nothing we do can curb his love of the game.

He is too much human. He sees the loss inside every gain. He sees the cold and soaking people beneath the rainbow. He sees what a human should see, and nothing more.

I am too much human. I am amused by his jokes. I am swayed by his arguments. I, too, begin to see the people who are laughing, and who soon will laugh no longer. I was to show him our world; instead, he has shown me his.

His world is becoming mine. For every human part of him I see, I find a piece inside myself; leftover from my vessel, collected from each death that I have caused, grown, even, from a faltering desire to believe in something, because belief is the one thing that I have always had and the one which now fails.

An angel with no faith is no angel, and I am falling. It is a testament to how far I have already come that I – I do not mind as much as I should. I am losing myself and I cannot bring myself to care.

He is human. He is everything a human is, everything that I shall become. The darkness that grows in him, will it become a part of me as well? Will I, too, lose sight of the clear paths that have guided me for an eternity?

No. I have set my foot on a different path, and though it leads down at least it leads somewhere. I have set myself firmly in Dean Winchester's footsteps, and I can only hope his headlong, human dash will lead me somewhere light.

I can only hope that being human is worth the fall.